On the one hand, companies with enormous data centers such as Facebook, Rackspace, Google and Goldman Sachs are creating their own compute, storage and network devices using cheap, commodity components. The pieces are built to a standard - organized by the Open Compute Project (OCP) - to ensure they interoperate, and they are then are assembled to create hardware that is finely tuned to the specific needs of an organization. This "disaggregation" of hardware allows one company to have a system that is optimized for high-storage capacity with low CPU, for example, while another company could customize the hardware for intense reading capabilities, but low writing.

Can autonomous cars give us a do-over with our cities, fossil fuel dependence, affordable housing, and also workers? Robin Chase, author of Peers, Inc and co-founder of Zipcar says yes. Or at least they have the potential to.

by Maira Sutton, Cat Johnson and Neal Gorenflo The sharing economy held great promise when it first emerged. It was seen as a way to help people build community, reduce unnecessary consumption, and generate extra income. It was based on the brilliantly simple notion that when we share, everybody has more.

Amid all the mayhem and turmoil of recent weeks, here's a news story you may have missed. The Romanian parliament unanimously passed an amendment to the country's "Law on the Sale of Food Products" bill which states that every large supermarket in the country must ensure that 51% of the fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, honey, dairy products and baked goods they stock are "locally sourced". As a demonstration of how enlightened policymaking can unlock Transition, it's an eye-catching and paradigm-shifting piece of legislation. But is it legal, and, actually, does that matter anyway?

I came across a fantastic article, that, at least for me, could be a game changer. It deals with clinical practice in the Amish communities of America. The Amish faith dictates they vet very carefully any innovation for stuff that could introduce perverse incentives in their lives. They prize something they call "autonomy": electricity, for example, can be bad if it powers activities that will make people drift away from the community, but it's OK for, say, lighting your workplace.

The three main ideas are summarised here. They were more progressive taxation to create greater equality both as a matter of fact and to deliver justice in the way that the deficit was tackled. Second, the tax gap was to be tackled to provide funding and to create a level playing field for business. And third, People’s Quantitative Easing was, in combination with a National Investment Bank, to be used to fund a new industrial strategy. What the document did not say was what the overall vision was: it focussed on policies not philosophies but it rattled the mainstream media and much of Labour nonetheless.

"Our economy is neither overwhelmingly capitalist, as Marxist political economists argue, nor overwhelmingly a market economy, as mainstream economists assume. Both approaches ignore vast swathes of the economy, including the gift, collaborative and hybrid forms that coexist with more conventional capitalism in the new digital economy. Drawing on economic sociology, anthropology of the gift and heterodox economics, this book proposes a groundbreaking framework for analysing diverse economic systems: a political economy of practices. The framework is used to analyse Apple, Wikipedia, Google, YouTube and Facebook, showing how different complexes of appropriative practices bring about radically different economic outcomes. Innovative and topical, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy focusses on an area of rapid social change while developing a theoretically and politically radical framework that will be of continuing long-term relevance. It will appeal to students, activists and academics in the social sciences."

((updates: Bratislava, Köszeg and Kumport added; Leicester added)) Since 2008 we all are in an economic crisis. Fortunately, in certain cities and city area's recently business and industry is suddenly picking up speed. Examples are Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Bavaria in Germany ("Laptops und Lederhosen"). On closer inspection city area's are booming in a trail from…

The Book of Peer Production has been released as a special edition of Journal of Peer Production. It consists of papers written by presenters at the Peer Production-track at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) in Göteborg 2014. It is cool, that all content in the book is in the public domain.

Complementary currencies like the Bristol Pound act as vouchers for national currency. You swap one Bristol Pound for a Bank of England pound at a 1:1 or 1:0,9 rate. The benefit of a currency like that is that it encourages money to stay in the local economy (jobs with it). The Bristol Pound is valid…

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.